For most of the past decade, the lobbying juggernaut of the career-college sector and its political patrons have fought a battle on Capitol Hill to federalize institutional decisions about transfers of credit. They have accused traditional colleges of refusing to award academic credit for what they claim is their institutions’ equivalent course work.
That refusal, career colleges allege, is based on the fact that the credits in question have been earned at institutions accredited by national, as opposed to regional, accrediting bodies. The remedy that career colleges have sought has been the imposition of a federal rule to bar traditional colleges from basing their transfer-credit practices solely on the identity of a college’s accrediting body, as long as that accrediting body is recognized by the U.S. secretary of education.
Such advocates of federal micromanagement of credit evaluation have inserted versions of their proposed transfer rule into three successive major Republican bills to amend and reauthorize the Higher Education Act in the House of Representatives, the last Senate Republican reauthorization bill, and the early drafts of the most recent Senate Democratic reauthorization bill — as well as into Hurricane Katrina relief legislation. In addition, they managed to slip an even broader mandate — which would have extended the federal rule on transfer to recognition of degrees granted by nationally accredited colleges — into the secretary of education’s proposals to impose unprecedented federal demands on accreditation (which she recently abandoned in light of bipartisan Congressional opposition).
Career-college advocates of the federal mandate have argued that political intervention is urgently needed to help students. But, as happens too often in Washington, the tail wags the dog: Transfers from for-profit to nonprofit institutions constitute only 4 percent of all first-time transfers, according to a 2005 Government Accountability Office study. Students who move from public two-year to four-year institutions compose by far the largest category of transfers (35 percent), with other variants — between two-year institutions, between four-year institutions, and from a four-year to a two-year institution — making up most of the rest.
My organization, the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, is painfully aware of the shortcomings of the current transfer environment and would be a willing participant in any serious organized effort to help students move more easily from one institution to another. Roadblocks include the lack of adequate information about course equivalency for students who intend to transfer, as well as the absence of tools and infrastructure to expedite the credit-evaluation process. Clearly, more could be done to improve the process for both students and institutions. But as the national group that represents registrars — the frontline transfer-admissions officials and credit evaluators — we are committed to defending the right of traditional higher-education institutions to control the awarding of their own credentials.
Academic judgment about course equivalency is best left to the faculty, and the American tradition of governmental noninterference in such matters should be preserved. The for-profit sector has sought to justify its demands for legislative intervention by claiming, without offering evidence, that traditional colleges’ rejection of otherwise acceptable credits from that sector has reached such alarming proportions that Congress must step into the fray. But even if that false and exaggerated claim were true, the most dangerous remedy would be to allow a group of politicians to determine whether course work at one college or type of institution should qualify for credit at another. Allowing the political process to trump a college’s independent judgment about whether it can substitute a transfer course for its own offerings would take away the most fundamental right of each institution: the right to set the academic terms and conditions that its students must meet to earn its credentials. At least in some cases, an institution’s academic judgment may quite reasonably conclude that the standards of an accreditor, albeit adequate for the secretary of education, fall so short of its own requirements that resources should not be wasted on a course-by-course evaluation of the institutions it accredits.
If political judgment about academic credits — the basic building blocks of academic degrees — is deemed in any way appropriate, it would inexorably lead to broad politicization of academic judgments in general. Issues that might be hotly contested in popular culture — like whether “intelligent design” has a place in a modern biology curriculum — would be immediately up for a vote in Congress. As imperfect as the faculty’s judgment may occasionally be about academic policy, that it is the group we should look to on such matters.
Beyond the fundamental principle of preserving academic freedom and institutional autonomy, the proposed federal mandate also raises operational issues. Institutional credit evaluation should ensure proper placement of transfer students in courses for which their previous course work has prepared them. Sloppy, carelessly generous, or politically driven approaches that mindlessly establish easy course equivalencies based on the similarity of course titles or a one-line entry in the transcript set students up for failure by placing them in higher-level courses for which they are not prepared. Such misplacements would only compound the duplication of cost and effort that the mandate seeks to avoid. Misplaced students would end up repeating the original transfer course along with the subsequent course in which they were erroneously placed.
The for-profit lobby has consistently characterized all adverse judgments about its courses as outright discrimination. The false syllogism of its argument is that its courses must be deemed identical to courses at nonprofit institutions because national accrediting bodies are recognized by the secretary of education, just as regional accrediting bodies are. But that recognition simply indicates that the various accrediting bodies have met the minimal requirements established in law, and thus constitutes a floor, not a ceiling, on the quality of their judgments on academic matters.
We all intuitively understand that some colleges routinely exceed the minimal levels of quality required by their regional accrediting bodies, let alone the substantially less rigorous demands of some national accrediting groups. If there were no difference in what the two types of accreditors required, career colleges could have easily remedied the perceived discrimination that they decry by simply switching and becoming regionally accredited. It is precisely because they can’t obtain regional accreditation — for substantive reasons that get to the heart of their programmatic offerings — that they have mounted a legislative campaign.
The intrusion of politics into what should have been a collegial effort has resulted only in a hardening of adversarial positions and the waste of precious resources that would have been better spent on building the missing national infrastructure to support easier and more-seamless transfer. For example, the construction of a national database of course offerings, along with verified syllabi, texts, and faculty qualifications, would be a key step toward improving transfer-credit evaluations at all institutions.
We invite the representatives of the for-profit sector to stop lobbying Congress and start a meaningful dialogue with traditional institutions. After nearly a decade of seeking, but failing, to impose their preferred outcome through force, gentle persuasion and real collaboration might well prove to be more effective. We stand ready to work together on realistic approaches to improve credit-evaluation decisions.
Barmak Nassirian is an associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 53, Issue 48, Page B9
